Snip, Burn, Solder Blog

Neil Armstrong, My Grandmother, Moonwalking, and the Only Game in Town

The death of Neil Armstrong occasioned a lot of interesting reflections out in the geekosphere; the most unexpectedly enlightening was this from Charles Apple, the visual journalism columnist for the American Copy Editors Society [sic]:
Keep in mind as you put together your Neil Armstrong packages tonight… — Charles Apple — copydesk.org

The problem as Apple sees it? We don’t have any good pics of Armstrong on the Moon, for the same reason that we don’t have many pics of me on vacation: Armstrong was holding the camera. For example, the pic at the left–which you saw all over the place attached to Armstrong obits–is Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong, and is a primitive photoshop job, to boot.
Once Apple pointed this out, I realized that I’d actually seen the undoctored photo (shown to the right) on plenty of occasions, but the framing of the two is so different that I actually had always thought they were two distinct photos.
As Apple works through the scant selection of legit photos of Armstrong on the Moon, what we find are a tiny handful of candid shots that, in many ways, are more wonderful than the iconic posed photo of Aldrin. This unconventional view of Armstrong, focused on his work and so far from anything remotely like home, is really poignant:

And this one–where we can see an actual human face in a little super-bathyspheric bubble in that dead gunpowder landscape–absolutely gives me shivers:

Anyway, it all reminded me of my favorite portrait of Armstrong on the Moon–which, in fact, is embedded in that iconic picture of Aldrin that Apple was so annoyed to see palmed off as a pic of Armstrong. Check out the reflection in Aldrin’s golden face-shield:

At first I thought what so touched me about this picture was the work ethic it highlighted: Armstrong was the first human to touch the moon, and was perfectly happy to let the other guy be in all the pics, because that was Armstrong’s job. A guy like Armstrong is called “hero” all the time, usually because of his willingness to face down death, but I’ve gotta level with you: that’s never impressed me much. I’ve known plenty of totally pieces of human garbage that would face down death. Frankly, it’s sorta what the male animal excels at. What *I’ve* always admired about astronauts–about scientists like Aldrin and Armstrong in general–is how many names appear at the top of those academic papers; I’m impressed by their willingness to work in teams and share credit and share findings and help the whole of humanity pull itself up by its bootstraps, even if it means forgoing some small sliver–or some giant chunk–of personal fame or riches or glory. To me, Armstrong is a hero not because he got all Quixote on the Moon, but because he understood how important that Sancho Panzas and Dulcineas are to executing the Impossible Dream.

I like Armstrong because he was willing to accept the possibility that he’d end up as history’s footnote, he’d hold the camera instead of standing in front of it.

But that’s not all of it. I also love this self-portrait because of the pose. The viewfinder on the Hasselblad Armstrong used (and evidently left) on the Moon was on the camera’s top, often called a “waist-level viewfinder.” Here’s a pic of the rig mounted to his EVA suit:

When I was little my grandma always favored a goofy old Brownie box camera–something quite similar to this Brownie Reflex Synchro–which also had a waist-level viewfinder. Since her vision was a touch presbyopic, “waist-level” actually was more like “sternum level.” My point being, Grandma’s photo-shooting posture–head sagging, shoulders slumped and folded in around her camera, hands cradling a magic box topped with a glowing, misty vision of the world we were in–and Armstrong’s were the same.
All of which is to say, in my heart of hearts, I love this portrait of Armstrong because I love my grandmother, who is also dead, and who we will likewise never see again.
Welcome to the only game in town. Amen

What would you MaKey MaKey?

A brand new MaKey MaKey was among the pile of mail awaiting me when I got home from my trip this weekend. Project 0 is throwing together a controller for playing Super Meat Boy. What would your Project 0 be?

Get “Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate” for Just 99 Cents!

Just a reminder that my steampunk novella (with new, original illustrations from the fantabulous Chad Sell) will be available on AMazon for just 99 cents (!!!) for about another week. Act fast, Kindle-wielding, steampunk-tolerant, literary-cowboy sex-book readers!

Utah Territory, 1874: The long American Civil War is finally over, and the Union restored thanks to the tireless service of the Chinese-built clockwork soldiers of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s Terrible Mechanical Corps. Discharged ‘clockies,’ feared and reviled for their efficiency on the battlefield, have moved West to live peacefully alongside an often suspicious citizenry. Peacefully, that is, until Dickie Tucker–a crippled, alcoholic Confederate veteran living in Utah Territory–teaches these machines the art and craft of being, or at least seeming, human.

(SNEAK PEEK: Amazon will give you a free sample for Kindle, or get the same sample chunk as a pretty slick DRM-free PDF right here.)

Teaching Is a Sales Position

I continue to write a column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This month–for the third month running–I’m writing about the Venn diagram of Business Practices and Teaching Practices. SPOILER ALERT: I’m not of the opinion that this diagram is two primary color circles with no overlap. FURTHER SPOILER ALERT: The governor and I do not agree about what lies in that cross-hatched overlap zone.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In It For The Money: Classroom Sales

Kids in compulsory public schools often aren’t willing buyers; they need to be sold. And even Lee Iacocca couldn’t sell 40 reluctant buyers in a single group. That takes goddamn sales magic, and the only cats with that kind of voodoo are politicians and snake-oil gurus. And there isn’t a single such talent in this great nation who’s ever going to settle for $42,000 per year plus medical and a pension–not when his or her earning potential starts in the low six figures and only goes up, up, up.
The problem with education in America–to the degree that there is a problem–is that we’re putting fair-to-middlin’ sales staff into a nearly impossible sales situation. No shoe store owner in the world expects his or her staff to sell shoes forty pairs at a time; if there’s that many folks coming through the door, then they hire more sales staff. They don’t expect shoe buyers to sit in rows six deep and stare at the ceiling while someone yammers to them indiscriminately about chunky heels or high-performance cross-trainers, without regard for what kind of feet they have and what kinda walking they need to do.
. . .

Sourcing Ticklebox and Spring Reverb Parts Outside the U.S.

It appears that RadioShack hasn’t only pulled it’s physical stores from Canada, but also won’t ship parts purchased at their website to Canada (owing to an interestingly tortuous licensing tiff).

Legal trivia aside, this is a total pain for Canadian readers of SNIP, BURN, SOLDER, SHRED, as several projects (specifically the Ticklebox and Spring Reverb effect) rely on an outmoded audio transformer that’s pretty idiosyncratic to the Shack.
Canadian maker Andrew Gray brought all this to my attention, and was kind enough to be a components guinea pig on behalf of his soldering-iron wielding fellow citizens. We’ve established that the RadioShack 1000:8 ohm audio output transformer can be replaced with the Xicon 42TM013-RC sold by Mouser.com as Mouser part #42TM013-RC. This transformer doesn’t have the handy color-coding that the RadioShack one does–and also will likely come with six leads (three on each coil), instead of five (three on one side and two on the other)–so you’ll wanna take a look at the datasheet or poke around with a multi-meter before you start soldering.
The SPDT relay I use for the Ticklebox is a little easier to source, several workable versions available through several vendors; Andrew has confirmed that the Omron G5LA-14-DC12 (Mouser part #653-G5LA-14-DC12) works great–and is about half the price of the RadioShack component I used (the audio transformer is about the same price as the RadioShack equivalent). Score one for the Maple Leaves!
Thanks for your help and patience, Andrew! Everyone else, back to soldering!

Public Speaking Advice from My Betters

I offer this (embedded below, from here: A Show with Ze Frank: How to Public Speaking) as a sort of corollary to what I wrote here (about the Worst Speech I Ever Gave). Ze’s method isn’t 100 percent my method, but we have a lot in common (specifically the edict to practice start-to-finish in a room alone, without stopping and starting or giving yourself redos)–and those were exactly the things I *didn’t* do in prepping for the Worst Speech Ever. Lived; learned.
My one addition to what Ze suggests here is this: As much as possible, avoid Giving a Speech, and instead Have a Conversation. By its nature, this is going to be a one sided conversation–because only one person in the room has a mic–but that’s OK; we’ve each been guilty of holding the floor past our turn. The trick is to talk to the people, not the mic: make eye contact, say specific sentences to specific people, try to LOL a specific guy. Just talk.
So, lessons learned–and shared with you! Enjoy!

Maker Faire Detroit 2012: The Autokineticons!

One of the best things about presenting at Maker Faire Detroit is that you basically get the run of the Henry Ford for three days, and get to poke around before the gates open and after they close. The conservator/mechanics at the Henry Ford are incredibly open and welcoming and enthusiastic about the machines they’ve restored and maintain–basically, they have the same attitude as the makers who’ve come to show off their projects.
So, for example, before the gates opened on Day 2–and thus before the crowds had poured in–I was wandering around looking for a pleasant bathroom when I came across the Henry Ford’s all-original, fully functional 1922 Detroit Electric, which had just been moved outside to be displayed with some other groundbreaking early automobiles.

This picture doesn’t really do the DE justice. It shows off the idiosyncratic back deck and the wonderful lines of the hood and fender, but can’t capture how wonderfully the body and paint have been restored; it’s smooth and so glossy it’s almost luminous, like puddles of black and blue ink on a white marble counter. And that glass? That curved glass? That’s *original*!
For those not in the know, I’ve included the official signage about this all-electric vehicle here. The Detroit Electric was often marketed as a “woman’s car” because it eschewed the grease and oil and petrol and could be started at the push of the button, rather than risking a broken wrist trying to crankstart a gasoline engine. This I’d all heard before; what I didn’t realize until the conservator pointed it out was that this “woman’s car” notion had influenced the interior design, as well. Check this out:

Those two bars next to the driver’s side door are the tiller steering (the longer bar folds down so that it’s horizontal in front of the driver) and the throttle (the shorter bar–if you look at the sign above you’ll see that there was actually a pretty interesting electromechanical system for varying speed and torque, because the car didn’t have a conventional variable transmission as we think of it). None of that was so special. What I love is the *seating*: The Detroit Electric “opera coupe” was driven from the left rear seat, and the front right passenger seat swiveled so that all of the passengers could sit facing each other and chat. You know, for the ladies.
Here’s another review of that swivel front passenger seat, which also gives a view of the left front passenger “jump seat.”

Finally, two more shots of the exterior, for good measure:

During load-out on the final day I got to take an impromptu joyride in an 1885 Benz Motorwagen–totally on the basis of my yelling at the passing motorist “Hey! Gimme a ride in that!” (I didn’t think he’d stop, because I didn’t think he’d even hear me over the racket of that damn thing’s crazy single-cylinder banger.)

The Benz was the first proper commercial automobile–in that it was actually built, top to bottom, to be a motorcar, and not just some crazy retrofit or barn-built one-off project. That said, it is still an absolutely *insane* vehicle to ride in. Because it was built to share the road with carriages and streetcars, you are really high up; it feels like you’re racing down the lane perched on top of a step-ladder nailed to a wagon. Once again we see a crank-style tiller steering system, which makes sense historically, but feels totally nuts when you’re riding shotgun and the driver has the hammer down and is weaving around a bunch of folks trying to load up their gear and get home as soon as possible. And check out the “engine compartment”–which is entirely open and includes hot things, exploding things, thrumming belts, and a roaring weighted flywheel. On the one hand, it’s behind you, so it’s not like you’ll be pitched into that churning mass of combustion and gear-ratios on a hard stop. On the other hand, if you’re a big goofus with a habit of draping his long arms behind the seat while riding in a car, you can loose a finger in a flash. Speaking of which, here’s me looking like a total goofus on this lil slice of modern human history (all fingers intact):

Maker Faire Detroit: Boomerangs, Conference Bikes, Soldering, and Over-Priced Treats! (@chrissalzman @dgoings @nostarch @makerfaire)

Up to now I’ve focused mostly on the work end of Maker Faire Detroit, which sorta elides the fact that the point of doing the work is in order to get a chance to run around and check out the fruits of everyone *else’s* labors. When we weren’t wigging out with cigar boxes and guitar strings or spreading the water rocket love, we got to gawk and blather and climb a big huge geodesic dome and eat some pretty darn deliciously overpriced faire-food (Big props to whoever tossed $20 of food tickets into one of our boxes. I don’t know if that was an unlikely wind-blown boon, or if someone surreptitiously helped him/herself to a copy of my book and elected to pay in meal tickets, but finding these in the middle of the first afternoon was a God send of ice-cream sandwiches, lemonades, and bottled waters.) Also, I finally got to ride the conference bike (*this exact conference bike,* although clearly none of those kids is me):

My booth at the Faire was directly adjacent to a table staffed by some students from the Henry Ford Academy, a small high school operated on the Henry Ford Museum campus (which is a pretty rad place to have a school; the older kids are out in some converted box cars in Greenfield Village and the first-year kids are tucked in behind the Dymaxion House in the museum itself). I spent a few days working with the kids last month, and they spent Maker Faire teaching folks to play Go, Tafl, Hex, and how to build cardboard boomerangs (a few pics below, once again courtesy of charming Chris Salzman):

I also got to help my six-year-old solder his *second* MAKE robot blink-eye project (multi-color LED eyes this year; *very* exciting):

Post-Maker Faire relaxation:

Maker Faire Detroit 2012: Rocking Out on the Cheap! (@chrissalzman @dgoings @nostarch @makerfaire)

Aside from making scads of free water rockets with impressionable midwestern youths, our other big goal at Maker Faire Detroit this year was spreading the Gospel of Rocking Cheap Homebrew Electronic Instruments.
(Again, all photos here are courtesy of the gracious and talented Chris Salzman, who took *lots* more over the course of Maker Faire weekend; check ’em out!)
The $10 Electric Guitar and its Fuzztone effect (which, honest to God, can both be built for under $15 total) are consistent pleasers, and a persuasive argument on the side of “you don’t need to drop much coin to rock the party”

The Cigar-Box Synth and Dirt-Cheap amp likewise went over well–and loud!

We also had the fully-amplified Thunderdrum–which makes a crazy vocal reverb if you shout into the can. This little guy ran up out of nowhere, grabbed the can away from a guy who was playing it more conventionally, and *screamed* into it, which was just about the most hardcore thing I’d ever seen. He *rules!*

Dave-o on the Thunderdrum:

With Dylan rocking the cigar-box electronica rig:

It was really, really a joy to share my enthusiasm for these instruments–which I really do love–and feel it reflected back and magnified by folks who, for the first time, were realizing “Hold up; I could make these things! I could make these things *better!*”
Expect a few more pics later this week!